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Climate fear promoter Jo Abbess has a science degree. Well done, Jo!

I’ve just had an email from someone signing herself Jo Abbess Bsc wanting to know whether I did a science degree. She has written it up at her online-CV-cum-website.

Jo who? The name rang a vague bell so I Googled her. Abbess, it turns out, was the blog bully who last year demanded the BBC censor a true story on its website about global cooling. She didn’t like the way it gave succour to evil Global Warming Deniers.

So she wrote to the BBC’s science editor Roger Harrabin a series of finger wagging emails, one of which went:

“It would be better if you did not quote sceptics. Their voice is everywhere on every channel.” [Really? She should try watching BBC sometime]. “They are deliberately instructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask: please reserve the main BBC Online channel for the emerging truth.”

When Harrabin replied, not altogether unreasonably, that there were no factual inaccuracies in his story, Abbess made a threat:

“I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.”

Harrabin got the message. (Not as though he is exactly the most neutral of reporters on AGW anyway, as anyone familiar with his “polar bears melt and Tuvalu sinks while the coal-fired power stations of cigar-smoking capitalists belch unprecedented quantities of CO2 into Mother Gaia’s lungs” style of eco-reporting will know).

He caved in and amended his story so that it accorded more correctly with Fraulein Abbess’s particular weltanschauung.

And now the woman’s on to me, Lord help us. No, Jo, love – unlike you I am not blessed with a physics degree from Warwick University. But does my humble arts degree really disqualify me from commenting on the wilder excesses of the self-flagellating, misanthropic, tendentious, dishonest and hysterical “green” movement?

Does anyone really need a science degree to understand that a five fold increase in the polar bear population between the 1950s and now does not constitute a catastrophic decline?

Is it really that scientifically demanding to work out that if computer models show global temperatures rising inexorably with CO2, and we suddenly enter a ten- or twenty-year period of global cooling, then there’s something a bit untrustworthy about those computer models?

Fortunately, as an English literature graduate, there are at least some areas of the green debate on which I am unquestionably fit to comment. Take this piece of doggerel I found on the Guardian comments pages the other day, on the kind of thinking we all need to embrace if we are ever to heal the world:

The new thinking has to be something like this :-
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
The only way we make it out of here alive is if we believe, and act as if
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies.

The author of this poem, I would say, makes William McGonagall look like Keats, has a lightness of touch that makes Polly Toynbee look like Noel Coward, and a depth of political insight which makes Tinky Winky Teletubby look like Thomas Jefferson. I’m sure the author of the piece who signed herself “Jo Abbess” cannot possibly be any relation of the distinguished Warwick University physics graduate who wrote asking about my academic credentials.